Court gives green light for Craigslist lawsuit against competitors

The popular classified advertising site Craigslist cleared an important hurdle on Monday as a federal judge refused to dismiss its lawsuit against several competitors. The ruling means that the startups Padmapper, 3taps, and Lovely will continue to face an expensive legal battle with their deep-pocketed rival.

Craigslist sued 3taps and Padmapper last summer. 3taps operated Craiggers, which provided an alternative interface for Craigslist listings. Padmapper displayed Craigslist apartment listings on a map years before Craigslist itself began offering a map view for its listings. Craigslist later amended its complaint to include Lovely, another site that republishes Craigslist listings, as a defendant.

Craigslist alleged a laundry list of misdeeds, including copyright and trademark infringement, breach of contract, and violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The defendants moved to dismiss Craigslist's claims. But on Monday, Judge Charles R. Breyer refused to dismiss most of the charges.

"Craigslist specifically denied authorization to use the website 'for any purposes' in its cease and desist letters and also used technological measures to block access from IP addresses associated with 3Taps, which Craigslist alleges that 3Taps bypassed by using different IP addresses and proxy servers to conceal its identity," Judge Breyer wrote. "Defendants’ continued use of Craigslist after the clear statements regarding authorization in the cease and desist letters and the technological measures to block them constitutes unauthorized access under the statute."

In the summer of 2012, Craigslist changed its terms of service to claim exclusive ownership of users' posts. It abandoned this approach after just three weeks due to a user backlash. Judge Breyer ruled that copyright infringement claims could go forward for ads submitted during that three-week window. But he dismissed Craigslist's copyright claims for all other ads, ruling that Craigslist can't sue for infringement based on the non-exclusive license Craigslist claimed outside of that three-week window.

Judge Breyer also allowed claims for breach of contract and violation of Craigslist's trademarks.

Craigslist's actions have sparked criticism from online commentators. "I am still at a loss about why Craigslist is taking such a scorched earth tactic against a site that appears to help more people find Craigslist postings," wrote Steve Schultze, a researcher at Princeton. "I’m particularly shocked because Craig Newmark has been at the forefront of fighting for so much good online policy."

"I am still at a loss about why Craigslist is taking such a scorched earth tactic against a site that appears to help more people find Craigslist postings," wrote Steve Schultze, a researcher at Princeton.

I'm going to go with a fear of losing control over their brand implementation. They want people to see their site how they intended it. The fear being that folks will associate the service more with the third-party apps than with Craigslist itself.

Twitter kinda did the same thing, though in a less "open mouth, insert foot" manner, by pushing most third- party apps out of the market. I think keeping an API that lets others still post to Twitter from other apps might be the difference between the reaction to them, and the reaction to Craigslist.

@pitmonster: The latter. They scrape data from Craigslist, then reformat it for their own sites.

I would much rather see Craigslist purchase the other sites and start a CraigsList Pro version for a subscription (say $5/year), and let that be the end of it, since some of those interfaces do improve of the original for some things.

The latter. They scrape data from Craigslist, then reformat it for their own sites.

I would much rather see Craigslist purchase the other sites and start a CraigsList Pro version for a subscription (say $5/year), and let that be the end of it, since some of those interfaces do improve of the original for some things.

The latter. They scrape data from Craigslist, then reformat it for their own sites.

I would much rather see Craigslist purchase the other sites and start a CraigsList Pro version for a subscription (say $5/year), and let that be the end of it, since some of those interfaces do improve of the original for some things.

I would rather see Newmark and Co. actually lose the case (unlikely in light of the data scraping issues). This litigation rather than innovation aided by misleading marketing and advertizing is exactly what is wrong with the technology market today. People are not getting enough credit for new ideas - especially with the extant player stonewalling or outright cheating them out of their due share of money and/or mindshare.

If craigslist would just modernize but still keep the simplicity of their website, make it mobile friendly...they wouldn't have this problem! People want a better looking website that is a little easier to sift through, sometimes I hate searching through craigslist because it is just a pain!

It blows me away how many entrepreneurs feel entitled to the data that Craigslist has collected.

Competition is great, but this isn't competition. It's scraping someone else's data & making a profit off of it.

I mostly agree, but I think it is an inevitable result when your site is terrible. I like the service Craigslist provides, but there are many inane things about the design (e.g. you have to search according to their pre-defined regions rather than searching an arbitrary area or the area "near you"). If the site was great, and didn't merely have the first-in advantage, I think this would be less of an issue.

I can also think of other sites that do similar things, that are just considered services. For example, kicktraq provides information about trends and histories for Kickstarter campaigns. Very cool, does reduce the number of clicks on Kickstarter but ultimately I think probably helps more than it hurts. Another example would be the tracker sites that give price history for items on Amazon. Not sure whether the net effect is positive or negative. But I haven't seen any lawsuits about it.

It blows me away how many entrepreneurs feel entitled to the data that Craigslist has collected.

Competition is great, but this isn't competition. It's scraping someone else's data & making a profit off of it.

So PadMapper, 3Taps, Lovely etc weren't adding anything to the experience ? Why the heck were users then going to these websites. This litigation first (supported by stealing others ideas - not data) attitude is definitely not the right way forward - what about a semblance of balance and trying to work together ? Or did CL think they should have the whole bag of advertizing monies (in spite of the fact that the others were actually bringing in more users with a fresh UI/UX)

That's a non sequitur. "Adding to the experience" is different from "not profiting from someone else's work."

Quote:

Why the heck were users then going to these websites. This litigation first (supported by stealing others ideas - not data) attitude is definitely not the right way forward - what about a semblance of balance and trying to work together ? Or did CL think they should have the whole bag of advertizing monies (in spite of the fact that the others were actually bringing in more users with a fresh UI/UX)

CL is/was protecting their position; I believe there is precedent that if someone does not enforce their exclusive rights to their IP, they lose said exclusive rights. While I would also prefer that it not be handled via litigation, what was their alternative? Before you say, "improve their website," be aware that that is not a valid method of legally protecting their IP.

Having said all that, good LORD does that site need some improvement. My local Computers and Tech listings are absolutely overrun with "I BUY BROKEN IPADS/IPHONES" spam, to the point where the "search by owner" option is getting useless again; all the dealers getting pushed out by the spammers just go to the Owners section.

Its only benefits over ebay these days are face to face transactions and it's free, but the amount of flakes, idiots, and scammers pretty much cancel that out.

If craigslist would just modernize but still keep the simplicity of their website, make it mobile friendly...they wouldn't have this problem! People want a better looking website that is a little easier to sift through, sometimes I hate searching through craigslist because it is just a pain!

Um, I get a mobile friendly version of CL on my iPhone when I visit, and I can now do map based searches for apts. I think they have been doing exactly what you are saying, slowly, quietly, occasionally subtly, tweaking the UI.

The truth is that apps like PadMapper know they will never be able to get the market / mindshare / brand power / default-ness of Craigslist. They will never be a household name like CL. Even Trulia, which is an established real estate brand, is useless for rentals compared to CL.

CL is private, and can do as they wish. Customers are free to list elsewhere - there is no lack of options for that - but CL is 1000% in the right on this one - there is just no excuse for stealing just because you can't get popular yourself.

Do you work for the sites stealing Craigslist data or are you just trolling? I find it hard to believe your ridiculous opinions are genuine

You seem to be the troll / shill here. If you don't have anything substantive to add please don't comment.

Please explain why people are going to use the other site (which use CL data) ? They must be finding some value-addition there that makes them go there instead of CL. The issue is not whether CL owns the data (which fortunately they don't - after their ill thought out attempt to change copyrights after the fact). The issue is whether working together (and giving value adders their due) rather than fruitless litigation (and stealing ideas) is the way forward.

It blows me away how many entrepreneurs feel entitled to the data that Craigslist has collected.

Competition is great, but this isn't competition. It's scraping someone else's data & making a profit off of it.

So PadMapper, 3Taps, Lovely etc weren't adding anything to the experience ? Why the heck were users then going to these websites. This litigation first (supported by stealing others ideas - not data) attitude is definitely not the right way forward - what about a semblance of balance and trying to work together ? Or did CL think they should have the whole bag of advertizing monies (in spite of the fact that the others were actually bringing in more users with a fresh UI/UX)

Do you work for the sites stealing Craigslist data or are you just trolling? I find it hard to believe your ridiculous opinions are genuine

It sounds like their interface sucks and other people have stepped up to help solve the issue.

As someone that often prefers the experience that a ripped DVD offers over the interfaces provided by streaming video services, I can totally relate to someone wanting an alternative to good data trapped in a bad interface.

This whole mess is going to set a series of bad precedents. They might even ensnare you one day.

It blows me away how many entrepreneurs feel entitled to the data that Craigslist has collected.

Competition is great, but this isn't competition. It's scraping someone else's data & making a profit off of it.

So PadMapper, 3Taps, Lovely etc weren't adding anything to the experience ? Why the heck were users then going to these websites. This litigation first (supported by stealing others ideas - not data) attitude is definitely not the right way forward - what about a semblance of balance and trying to work together ? Or did CL think they should have the whole bag of advertizing monies (in spite of the fact that the others were actually bringing in more users with a fresh UI/UX)

Do you work for the sites stealing Craigslist data or are you just trolling? I find it hard to believe your ridiculous opinions are genuine

It sounds like their interface sucks and other people have stepped up to help solve the issue.

As someone that often prefers the experience that a ripped DVD offers over the interfaces provided by streaming video services, I can totally relate to someone wanting an alternative to good data trapped in a bad interface.

This whole mess is going to set a series of bad precedents. They might even ensnare you one day.

+1. What is about about these so-called "fossilized" first movers that they think litigation is the way forward for everything under the sun. Every such case reinforces my belief that IP laws in this country needs to be outright scrapped.

Do you work for the sites stealing Craigslist data or are you just trolling? I find it hard to believe your ridiculous opinions are genuine

You seem to be the troll / shill here. If you don't have anything substantive to add please don't comment.

Please explain why people are going to use the other site (which use CL data) ? They must be finding some value-addition there that makes them go there instead of CL. The issue is not whether CL owns the data (which fortunately they don't - after their ill thought out attempt to change copyrights after the fact). The issue is whether working together (and giving value adders their due) rather than fruitless litigation (and stealing ideas) is the way forward.

Please explain why people are going to use the other site (which use CL data) ? They must be finding some value-addition there that makes them go there instead of CL. The issue is not whether CL owns the data (which fortunately they don't - after their ill thought out attempt to change copyrights after the fact). The issue is whether working together (and giving value adders their due) rather than fruitless litigation (and stealing ideas) is the way forward.

What if CL doesn't want to work with anyone else? That's their prerogative. If CL wants to take their ball and go home the are allowed to -- that doesn't give these other companies the right to scrap CL's content and apply their value add to it. Period.

Craigslist has become something of a problem due to its interface, especially in regards to how it restricts access to regional groups. This wouldn't really be an issue if it wasn't for the fact that Craigslist has become something of a standard for how goods, services and jobs are advertised. In the case of something like jobs, many applicants are perfectly willing to look across the country for a good fit. Craigslist makes that a real nuisance. A less common scenario is the person who is looking for a place to live but isn't restricted to considering a particular city or state. Craigslist has really wrapped up the apartment and room search market, and with so few places being advertised through other sites, these searches are a real pain now.

It's a little strange to me that Craigslist can go after companies like Padmapper, but they don't do anything against a company like Google which freely allows me to do a site specific search. It's not as if Padmapper was allowing users to bypass visiting the Craigslist site any more than Google does (both take you directly to Craigslist to view the ads you want to see).

+1. What is about about these so-called "fossilized" first movers that they think litigation is the way forward for everything under the sun. Every such case reinforces my belief that IP laws in this country needs to be outright scrapped.

How about you research the past actions of CL and the others before you try to say that CL thinks litigation is the way forward -- CL tried to work with them and they refused.

Do you work for the sites stealing Craigslist data or are you just trolling? I find it hard to believe your ridiculous opinions are genuine

You seem to be the troll / shill here. If you don't have anything substantive to add please don't comment.

Please explain why people are going to use the other site (which use CL data) ? They must be finding some value-addition there that makes them go there instead of CL. The issue is not whether CL owns the data (which fortunately they don't - after their ill thought out attempt to change copyrights after the fact). The issue is whether working together (and giving value adders their due) rather than fruitless litigation (and stealing ideas) is the way forward.

I shill for no one. If I stole a program you wrote, added a map to it, and sold it as my own program, you'd try to sue me too.

"Working together" with your IP thieves, give me a frickin break

We have got it, you are the CL shill.

CL does not own the ads put on by users. An un-enforce-able TOS is all they have ... if they have a public website then whatever is on there is publicly viewable, downloadable and open for use by anybody. There is no IP thieves involved here. You seem to have no idea how third parties listed in this case were using the CL user posted ad data. In PadMapper you can actually see a mini-framed version of the CL ad. They are not selling it as their data or ad - just reformatting it into a more useful form.

In my mind CL is in the wrong here, because they know that this reformatting and UI/UX change is actually popular in the market (hence the users on those websites) and now want to steal that idea without giving due recognition - by using a bunch of lawyers.

Do you work for the sites stealing Craigslist data or are you just trolling? I find it hard to believe your ridiculous opinions are genuine

You seem to be the troll / shill here. If you don't have anything substantive to add please don't comment.

Please explain why people are going to use the other site (which use CL data) ? They must be finding some value-addition there that makes them go there instead of CL. The issue is not whether CL owns the data (which fortunately they don't - after their ill thought out attempt to change copyrights after the fact). The issue is whether working together (and giving value adders their due) rather than fruitless litigation (and stealing ideas) is the way forward.

I shill for no one. If I stole a program you wrote, added a map to it, and sold it as my own program, you'd try to sue me too.

"Working together" with your IP thieves, give me a frickin break

They didn't steal a program. It's not even clear to me they are stealing revenue. Craigslist makes money by presenting ads. Those ads still get presented. The advertisers still have incentive to buy those ads, if anything more incentive because the ads can be read in more places and more ways.

The only issue I see for Craigslist is if their interface for viewing the ads is sufficiently worse than these other companies, so people migrate to the others, it would be easy for these other companies to add or substitute other ad data from sources other than Craigslist. In other words, these other companies potentially could be creating a situation where competition is possible rather than what is a virtual monopoly.

+1. What is about about these so-called "fossilized" first movers that they think litigation is the way forward for everything under the sun. Every such case reinforces my belief that IP laws in this country needs to be outright scrapped.

How about you research the past actions of CL and the others before you try to say that CL thinks litigation is the way forward -- CL tried to work with them and they refused.

A cease and desist on using publicly available data is unenforceable. The solution for CL eventually is going to be a closed (login required) website, and a concomitant loss of consumer/user mind share or CL will have to go offline. None of which look like real solutions.

Even if CL wins this round, as long as they are the most popular classifieds website, some one can and will set up a worldwide distributed scrapping method and make access blocking by IP address impossible.

Craigslist does provide a license to companies that want to use the Craigslist data for mobile devices. In the court filing, Craigslist says that “PadMapper was offered a license to such content, but did not accept the terms.”

+1. What is about about these so-called "fossilized" first movers that they think litigation is the way forward for everything under the sun. Every such case reinforces my belief that IP laws in this country needs to be outright scrapped.

How about you research the past actions of CL and the others before you try to say that CL thinks litigation is the way forward -- CL tried to work with them and they refused.

Why the heck would some one make a deal with CL to buy publicly available data - the onus is on CL to pay the money to sites like PadMapper, et al., because evidently people know CL's UI/UX sucks. At least the likes of PadMapper et al. were bringing in the footfalls, eventually and / or indirectly.

CL should have remained the ad posting back-end and let these third parties make the UI/UX decent by paying them. Instead they went berserk at the court-house and have now started re-inventing the wheel !Frankly, this looks like a classic case of foot-in-the-mouth and a cart-before-the-horse situation by CL.

What a bizarre ARS article. The actual ruling has two important findings:

1) By circumventing Craigslist's attempts to block their crawling, 3taps broke the law.2) Because Craigslist does not have an exclusive license from the creators of the postings on the site, they have no copyright claim to the material and cannot claim copyright violation when third parties re-use it.

These are both important. 2 may be more important than 1. But ARS completely neglects to mention that whole side of the ruling and frames the decision as a victory for Craigslist? WTF? This is a huge copyright case that was (I think) decided wisely and appropriately and could have a big impact on the Internet. ARS usually focuses on copyright and IP issues to the exclusion of other legal areas. So what happened in this article?

BTW, one day there will be a book and/or HBR study about Craigslist, and how their culture of laziness and fear of investment prevented them from being a peer of comparable size and power to Amazon, EBay, and Google. It's kind of sad seeing them fighting for these little scraps today.

They can create their listings and promote it. They won't. But they could

You can't own data. Data are facts and courts have said over and over that you cannot own facts/data. They're not stealing a damn thing. Get off your moral outrage, they've done nothing illegal. Craig's is just trying to litigate competitors out of the market instead of just simply competing. This is nothing new. Businesses try to sue competitors into oblivion so that they can monopolize the market. Craig's list is no different.

What if CL doesn't want to work with anyone else? That's their prerogative. If CL wants to take their ball and go home the are allowed to -- that doesn't give these other companies the right to scrap CL's content and apply their value add to it. Period.

Fair enough, CL has that right, to work alone. Then they should just go ahead and shut down their website. Because that TOS about not scrapping data off CL is tantamount to not viewing CL at all. Some one is probably (as we write) coming up with a distributed scrapping engine. Will CL then block the rest of the internet ? Or will CL start suing MS, Mozilla and Google for showing their web-pages ?

Also I the likes of PadMapper have competent enough programmers then some one will come up with a FF addon for showing the rental digs on a map (in fact CL Mapper already does something similar).

Knowing how the internet works sometimes helps in preventing such absurdities.

I'm going to go with a fear of losing control over their brand implementation. They want people to see their site how they intended it. The fear being that folks will associate the service more with the third-party apps than with Craigslist itself.

Craigslist has no brand. Their site has no graphics or design of any kind. It's just bulleted lists. The company's logo is the word "craigslist" in 90px purple "serif" font. They didn't even specify a typeface. How is that a brand?

Twitter kinda did the same thing, though in a less "open mouth, insert foot" manner, by pushing most third- party apps out of the market. I think keeping an API that lets others still post to Twitter from other apps might be the difference between the reaction to them, and the reaction to Craigslist.

Craigslist and Twitter have data people want but it's buried under atrocious interfaces. No wonder others want to mine that data and improve how people connect to it.

The money that Craigslist is spending on this lawsuit could be spent on hiring a web designer. Rather than suing people, Craigslist should be entering into an ad revenue sharing partnership with these other sites that are doing the design work for them. Trying to sue other people for indexing your site and presenting the data in a better format is tantamount to suing search engines for indexing your site.

Timothy B. Lee / Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times.